Extras submissions (was: Re: Orphaned and potentially unmaintained packages)

[Ville Skyttä]

On Sun, 2005-01-30 at 19:11 +0100, Michael Schwendt wrote:

> *shrug*  Ville, for instance, would cvs-import a src.rpm if there were an
> update request at fedora.us for FC3 and older. That has been usual
> procedure for many packages since CVS was announced.

Yes, that works pretty well.  The benefit of signed SRPM submissions
from trusted packagers is that the submission contains all the sources
that the submitter has been using and which (s)he has already verified
not containing malicious code etc.

So, it's less work for the one who imports it, no further source
verification has to be done (but of course may, if the importer so
desires), and one can just use the tools available in the CVS repo and
import it, not that much manual work involved.

I would also suggest that if one submits changes targetting >= FC3 only,
don't use the "0.fdr." release prefix.  If older distros are targeted,
_do_ use it.  The fedora.us build system still used building for < FC3
operates on SRPMs and md5sums, and can do some modifications to the
release tag on the fly; that capability does not unfortunately include
adding the 0.fdr prefix, which is still necessary for < FC3 builds due
to (pre-)Extras builds no more using the same "disttag" scheme.

When done this way, it's less work for everyone involved; I will use the
submission as-is for < FC3 builds in the fedora.us build system, and
will manually tweak the release tag before importing to Extras CVS, and
the submitter can keep on submitting a single SRPM (assuming it works
for all target distro versions).  Please also consider whether you
_really_ want to submit updates for older distro versions, and be
prepared to verify all those builds if you do.

Once the FC4 branch is open, the amount of needed manual work will
increase, and we'll see whether the suggestions above will need
adjustments.  Hopefully by that time there will be an official Extras
build system as well as quite a few more people with CVS commit access
who can take care of the commits themselves.